In our days, more and more people capture audiovisual memories of their experiences, by means of digital devices with video and photo capturing. Technologies for audiovisual memories recording are more and more widespread and efficient. It is indeed common, nowadays, to find photo cameras with the ability to record short video sequences, or mobile phones with an embedded high-resolution photo and video cameras. Since the availability of these digital devices is so pervasive, as a matter of fact most users are accustomed to record both photo and video memories of the same events, or to receive them from one or more other persons who were also present at the event. Therefore it is quite common for a user to have video and photo material that refers to the same occasion, place and time.
Many ideas and systems have been presented in order to help users in editing and managing their personal audiovisual memories, such as systems for automatic video editing and semi-automatic home video editing.
The ever-increasing capacity of storage devices allows users to shoot a great number of photos and store them without any selection. This overwhelming quantity of data, joint with the lack of proper visualization tools, may cause users to rarely watch their recorded memories.
The photo set can also be exploited to enrich the video by adding some photos inside the video. By extracting sequential sub-parts of a given photo, some small video clips can be artificially generated, and included in the video. The basic assumption is that, by adding some content-related photos inside the video stream, the resulting video will be much more informative to the user rather than considering the single video source. The Muvee Reveal AutoProducer from Muvee Technologies is an example of a commercial software package that allows inserting photos into video. The photos are animated with some virtual camera motion. The idea is that, by doing so, watching a photo can become a more pleasant experience for the user.
Although it is quite common for users to have both video and photo material that refer to the same events, few attempts have been made to exploit jointly this information, while no known attempt has been performed in order to blend the two data sources according to media aesthetic rules.
Hence, an alternative method of combining video and still photos would be advantageous, and in particular a method wherein the combination of photos and video provides enhanced user experience due to a visually more appealing experience would be advantageous.